Over 20 representatives from Welsh HE, FE and Public Libraries gathered in Swansea last Friday to spend a day hearing about “Open Source for libraries- theory and practice”. There has been a definite groundswell of interest in this topic recently (e.g. the recent discussions on library mailing lists) so the day seminar felt very timely.

The slides from the day are all available on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/Mark_H_Swansea/slideshows and Mark Hughes has added an excellent collection of links for more information.

Speakers Mark Hughes, Ken Chad and Nick Dimant gave their perspectives on the background to open source in libraries – the current environment and reasons for and against looking at open source solutions. In the UK there has not yet been a significant take-up of open source LIBRARY systems although the success of the open source VLE Moodle has gone some considerable way to prove the concept of using open source in education. In other countries, the take-up of open source library management systems (LMS) has been growing fast – the US, France and India in particular. Nick Dimant of PTFS Europe commented on the trend that the growth of open source was linked with the existence of capable local support centres.

After lunch Jonathan Field from PTFS Europe gave a detailed demo and comparison of the 2 major open source systems: Koha and Evergreen. I’d definitely recommend a look at his presentation (combined with the demo versions available on the web) for anyone seriously interested in them – both were really impressive in terms of functionality but, like any system, come with their own pros and cons. Thinking of the need for a Welsh language interface, Koha already has the option to be multilingual and Evergreen is currently being developed further to support bilingual use in Canada.

We also had an excellent overview of the ongoing implementation of the open source VuFind system as part of the Virtual Academic Library project in Wales by Paul Johnson (presentation here). VuFind is being used to provide a common interface for searching 3 universities’ print and electronic resource collections. The project is a good example of how Wales is leading the way on library collaboration and open source development!

Mark Hughes also publicised the useful work that has been done at Swansea with RFID, resulting in the Open RFID in Libraries Specification (ORILS) being published under a Creative Commons licence. This can be re-used by anyone undertaking an RFID procurement process and work is ongoing to build a community of practice to encourage interoperability between the different RFID systems. http://groups.google.com/group/ORILS/web for more information!

The fact that question time at the end ran over reflects the level of interest on the day and also the concerns felt about open source. Some of these – lack of vendor support, handling the procurement process and data migration – can be mitigated by using a 3^rd party support company in place of the traditional LMS vendor. This is an added cost but should still return a big saving overall on paying for a commercial system.

I came away from the day full of enthusiasm and hoping an institution in the UK (Wales?) will take the plunge and implement an open source LMS in the near future. I also felt it could be useful to bring in the experiences from the transition to Moodle in terms of allaying the fears (particularly within HE) in switching to open source. One of the key things that emerged from the day was that open source does not mean going it alone – as well as the support of the community, there is always the option of paying for professional support just to get started or as an ongoing safety net.

NB. The RSC Wales information area on LMS has also been updated with info from the day: http://moodle.rsc-wales.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=2923&chapterid=150

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 12:35 pm and is filed under LMS, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.